Savannah Book Festival: Isabel Wilkerson explores the Great Migration

Isabel Wilkerson interviewed 1,200 people in preparation for writing her book “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”

The book tells the story of the decades-long migration of African Americans who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life. Wilkerson will discuss it at the Savannah Book Festival.

The author visited Savannah 10 years ago. “I’m so looking forward to being there again,” she says. “It’s so rich with history, one of the cities in the South that has retained so much history physically and is a very romantic place.

“I remember walking down a street near one of the squares and being struck by how friendly people were. It’s a very sophisticated city.

“It’s a thrill to be talking in Georgia,” Wilkerson says. “It’s my own ancestral home. My mother was from Georgia.”

Wilkerson conducted so many interviews because she wanted to find the perfect voices to express the journey along the three main streams of migration between 1915 and the 1970s. “That was a casting call,” she says. “The interviews were a form of auditioning people for the role of being a protagonist in the book.

“I interviewed people all over country — in senior centers, in churches,” Wilkerson says.

“In the north, midwest and west, there were actually clubs to represent the hometowns of people from the South who had migrated.

“There was a Greenwood, Miss., club, a Brookhaven, Miss., club, all these different clubs. I had to go to all of them, as well. If I wanted to speak with someone from Grenada, Miss., I had to go to that club.”

After 15 years of work, it took two years for the book to come out. It became a bestseller almost instantly and went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lynton History Prize and the Heartland Award, and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

“I’m not weary of the topic,” Wilkerson says. “I find it endlessly fascinating. I feel connected to the people and the experience.

“I had the joy of spending time with people I had the luxury of choosing. They were Southerners by birth and culture.

“They were rich with stories and character,” she says. “They were big-hearted people. They were a joy to be with.”

In 1994, while working as the Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, Wilkerson became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She won for her coverage of the 1993 Midwestern floods and her profile of a 10-year-old boy who was responsible for his four siblings.

“I’m very grateful,” Wilkerson says. “Having won the Pulitzer in some ways opened the door for the book I spent so much time on.

“It brought attention to the work I’d been doing which made more possibilities for the book,” she says. “I began writing it not long after winning.”

Though writing the book took a long time, Wilkerson never tired of it. “Just the thought of what they had endured kept me going,” she says.

“One of the big challenges was when people got sick,” Wilkerson says. “There were times when I’d plan to go see someone and instead of seeing someone at home and hear their stories, had to go to the hospital.

“There were times when people were actually in a coma and could not speak. I’d sit with them in the hospital.”

At times, Wilkerson wondered if she’d be able to complete her task or if she would have to change her plan. “The average age of my sources is 78,” she says.

“These are people in their 70s, 80s and into their 90s. I even found one who turned 100 in the course of my work.”

Wilkerson made some startling findings. “Something that surprised me and saddened me at the same time was all the misconceptions about who these people were, which in some ways says a lot about people’s assumptions about Southerners in general,” she says.

“There were assumptions these people were not family oriented, that they did not work, they were lazy, that they basically had big families but didn’t want to work,” Wilkerson says. “That wasn’t the case at all.”

But the migrants did stay true to who they were. “They were Southern by birth and remained Southern in their bearing and their speech and culture for the rest of their lives,” Wilkerson says.

One of the most stunning findings was that at that time, European immigrants were having far more children than the Southern blacks who migrated north. “They didn’t have fewer children by a small margin,” Wilkerson says.

“This was according to a study conducted by sociologists at Harvard who had lists of women arriving in the cities in 1940,” she says. “These Southerners had the lowest number of births on the list.”

People who participated in the Great Migration often went through tremendous hardships. “I get asked a lot, did I feel angry at many of the things I discovered or did I get sad?” Wilkerson says.

“I kind of replaced what would have been sadness and anger with fascination of things I didn’t know and a desire to get it out there,” she says. “It propelled me. The things I discovered made me want to complete it even more. It inspired me to get the word out.”

There was a lot Wilkerson didn’t know until she began working on the book. “I didn’t have any idea about the level of intricacy of the caste system that existed in the South,” she says. “Even people who lived in the era find they are surprised it was so intricate and thought-out and involved.

“They had to memorize the rules,” she says. “In Birmingham, it was against the law for blacks and whites to play checkers together. These bizarre and arcane laws made it difficult to get through the day.”

Since the book’s publication, Wilkerson has made several presentations. “I’ve spoken from Alaska to Amsterdam,” she says. “What I’ve experienced is that so many people find a direct connection from these people to themselves, no matter where they’re from.

“Immigrants of all walks of life tell me stories that are universal and human. So many of our ancestors made the decision to journey so far away.

“I remember being in Illinois and a woman told me about her great-grandmother who came from Ireland at age 8 and never saw her parents again, which was a very common experience,” Wilkerson says. “It’s astonishing what it takes to do what all these people did -- leave home for a place they’ve never seen, with no guarantees.”

Many of the migrants were very young, Wilkerson says. “They were either sent off by their parents for something better or they themselves journeyed at such a young age,” she says. Regardless of background, whether they were part of the Great Migration or not, people almost always tell Wilkerson the same thing. “Almost always they say, ‘I had no idea,’” she says. “Somehow it touches them and they say, ‘I lived through this era and had no idea.’”

At the time it occurred, it would have been hard to realize, Wilkerson says. “The South was a very large region of the country,” she says.

“The way the caste system worked was different in each state, each county. There were different assumptions, different protocols.

“They all overarched with the goal of keeping people apart,” Wilkerson says. “It was difficult for anyone living at the time.”

Today, many African Americans have returned to the South in great numbers. “I don’t call it the reverse migration,” Wilkerson says. “That suggests going backward.

“I refer to it as the return migration. These are the children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of the ones who left, and people see a circular connection between the children coming back to a place their people might have fled.”

Wilkerson herself started composing her book in Chicago, but completed it in Atlanta. “One of the things I’ve taken away is that the Great Migration is misunderstood,” she says.

“It was not a move in the same way that people now may be relocated by jobs. Many of these people were fleeing for their lives.

“Many would have no other options,” Wilkerson says. “They had to make heartbreaking decisions and make a complete break from everything that they knew.”

The stakes were very high, Wilkerson says. “I just think for history’s sake, it’s important to recall the era in which people had to make the migration,” she says.

“Many had never been outside of the county where they were born. They were making a great leap of faith and there is no comparison to anything that is happening today.”

Since the book’s publication, Wilkerson has traveled the country to speak. “This was one of the great untold stories of American history and it involved 6 million people, the entire country, so it was a very big thing,” she says.

“It has really taken over my life. Two years, and I’ve not stopped talking about it.

“The Great Migration meant changes to the country, its culture, music, art, theater and dance,” Wilkerson says. “I’ve been speaking about it to such a degree, I have appointments scheduled into 2014. That is a testament to people’s connection to the story and the enduring nature of freedom.”